Author: Milan

In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. Between 2005 and 2007 I completed an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford. I worked for five years for the Canadian federal government, including completing the Accelerated Economist Training Program, and then completed a PhD in Political Science at the University of Toronto in 2023.

Robots in agriculture

The Economist recently printed an article describing experimentation in the use of robots for agriculture, which included some interesting claims about potential environmental benefits:

The company will offer its robots as a service. Tom will live in a kennel on the farm, where it will download data for the farmer and recharge. Dick and Harry will be delivered to farms as and when they are needed, much as farmers already bring in contractors. This business model, reckons Mr Scott-Robinson, will demonstrate to farmers that the cost of using agribots will be competitive with other weed-control measures and provide additional benefits, such as being chemical-free.

…

When chemicals are required on crops, both tractor-towed systems and agribots could apply microdoses to the individual plants that require them, rather than spraying an entire field. Some trials have suggested microdosing could reduce the amount of herbicide being sprayed on a crop by 90% or more. basf, a German chemical giant, is working with Bosch, a German engineering firm, on a spraying system that identifies plants and then applies herbicides in just such a targeted way.

That’s certainly attractive compared to indiscriminate spraying of whole fields, though there will surely be downsides to such automation as well. Few people work in agriculture in rich societies already, but such technologies could affect the relationship between capital and labour nonetheless, and much more so in places where farming is less automated already.

Government and law enforcement back doors

One computer security concern is that various insiders — including hardware and software manufacturers, and governments which may compel them to comply — will build back doors into their products to allow the security to be compromised.

Doing this is a terrible idea. A back door put in for government surveillance or police use is also vulnerable to use for any purpose by anyone who discovers it. There’s no way to create strong encryption and security against everyone except the government, so building in back doors means deliberately spreading insecure systems throughout your society. When you deliberately design your systems to be vulnerable to one attacker (however well-motivated and regulated) you inevitably create an attack vector for an unauthorized person. You also face vulnerability if the mechanism of the backdoor is reverse engineered by unregulated agents, like criminal groups or foreign governments. With the degree of espionage focused in high-tech industry, it’s hard to imagine that any government could keep their back door strictly for their own use when well-resourced and determined opponents would also achieve many objectives through access.

The latest high-profile example of such a back door is the revelation that Swiss cryptography firm Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA. There have been numerous recent news stories, but the same information was reported in 1995. The National Security Archive has some further context.

Related:

From Greta Thunberg’s UN address

“The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5C degrees, and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.

Maybe 50% is acceptable to you. But those numbers don’t include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of justice and equity. They also rely on my and my children’s generation sucking hundreds of billions of tonnes of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist. So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us – we who have to live with the consequences.”

Greta Thunberg’s full speech to world leaders at UN Climate Action Summit

September 27th Climate Strike

After attending half of a classmate’s job talk for a law and political science position at Guelph I photographed today’s Climate Strike in Toronto. It was a big organic crowd, with some contingents from labour or specific causes who were clearly together but where most people carried home-made signs which didn’t come out of a print shop or an activists’ art build.

It’s good to see the level of concern, which is perhaps hardening into a willingness to demand action. That’s what it will take with a government as deferential to industry as Canada’s is. If Justin Trudeau hadn’t twisted a little to help SNC-Lavalin that would certainly have been the default approach in Canada’s civil service, which exists in symbiosis with the industries which it is meant to regulate. They fall over themselves to bail out the automobile industry, so the scale of changes necessary to address climate change is broadly unthinkable to them: totally outside the scope of what they see as possible to implement. They’re also the guardians of federalism, so the inter-provincial dynamics of fossil fuel and climate change politics are frightening to them, strengthening a trained impulse to generally try to muddle through with as little fundamental change as possible.

Preventing the worst effects of climate change now demands boldness far beyond what the Liberals and Conservatives are offering — perhaps more along the lines of what Green Party members whisper to each other during fearful conversations about climate change and the human future. The world of 2000 looked nothing like the world of 1900, and 2100 may be more different still. All of this can go: rapid transport options available to anyone with money, cities dominated by the private car, exotic foods in all seasons, cheap and automatic indoor climate control in summer and winter, suburbia. The populace takes it all for granted politically and ultimately emotionally, but it’s fragile. Indeed, it has never really been functioning in the way people thought, since the interactions between people behaving that way and the rest of the biosphere gradually erode away the web of life on which human survival depends. I think we’ll find that our personal options will inevitably be constrained in some ways in the future, which will produce a series of political fights which will make hyperbole about carbon taxes seem like gentle childhood provocation.

Hey, I tend to be a worrier though. Maybe Greta will provoke the world sufficiently to drive politicians everywhere to reverse their foolish commitment to continued fossil fuel dependence and implement the kind of rapid global decarbonization which is feasible with cooperation and cheap compared to suffering the effects of unconstrained climate change. The logical and ethical case for action is a slam dunk, it’s just hard to accept that we actually need to make sacrifices so that future generations won’t inherit a degraded world where changing global conditions continuously imperil them and in which the richness of life has been sharply circumscribed by our unwillingness to get over coal, oil, and gas at a rate that does justice to the inheritors of the Earth.

It’s also logically possible that some combination of technological development and political change will lead to the kind of mass renewable deployments being called for at rallies like today’s, and by organizations like 350.org. David MacKay’s book is convincing that there is enough renewable energy potential to give all the world’s billions of inhabitants a standard of living comparable to that in Europe today, based around a much more equitable distribution of global energy use.